The Sunlight Dialogues (99 page)

He stood by the window, leaning on his knees, and you would have thought he weighed tons, like the devil himself. Here, above where the trees intercepted the sunlight, there were certainties, including certainties of doubt. He doubted that he had been a good husband, for all his devotion to duty and justice with respect to his wife. He doubted that he had been honest with himself or honest with his wife either. There was a good deal he could have done and should have done. He should have sailed around the world, should have bought himself a boat on Lake Ontario. The unrealized life lurched and groped inside him like some primeval creature in an ancient jungle, and its presence inside him mocked and poisoned the life he had lived. “Nobody’s life is perfect,” he said. But there were reasons for that. Any life a man chooses, Clumly mused, betrays the life he failed to choose. And now it was no longer important, it was enough to know that it was so. “Good luck,” he said aloud, seeing again in his mind’s eye the physician who could not choose which harm to inflict on his son. “And good luck to Kozlowski,” he thought. Because Kozlowski would come for him, would imagine it was his solemn duty to escort the old man to this last conversation with the Sunlight Man—with Taggert Hodge, condemned. But Clumly would not be there when Kozlowski came. He would be gone, dressed as an ordinary man, and whatever he learned or failed to learn would have nothing to do with law and order in the common sense. He had promoted himself. He was now Chief Investigator of the Dead.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to speak to you tonight on Law and Order. No subject could be more familiar, and more strange. What do we mean by Law and Order? Think back to the time when you and I, not human yet, bumped our blind way through this world as fish. .
. .

Looking almost straight down, just over the gable of the porch roof below him, he could see, between the branches of the nearest tree, a small patch of grass and sidewalk. Four boys ran into the area framed by roof and leaves, one of them wearing a bright yellow jacket, and then the next instant they were out of it again, bounding up onto his porch and along it to Clumly’s right and then away, out through the garden. “Stop!” he thought. But though his policeman’s instinct was strong, he did not stir a muscle. A moment later a man with a stick came into the small space Clumly could see and paused there, looking left and right. Clumly thought of raising the sash and calling down to him, but still he did not act. The man went off to the right, still looking around. There were voices now, two adults, the words distinct. Clumly felt queerly removed from it all, emotionally as aloof from the world where hooligans ran through people’s yards as he was physically aloof from the street.

It was half an hour later that Esther came home. He watched her come slowly up the walk, her white cane in one hand and, in the other, her sewing basket. She too, you would have said, had taken on weight. Esther had taken the tapes. Her reason was unimportant. When he heard her coming up the stairs toward the second floor he tip-toed out of the third-floor room where he’d been waiting and went up the splintery attic stairs to wait while she replaced the tapes, if she’d brought them back, or changed her clothes, if that was her intent. Nothing especially mattered but that she not see him just now, not trouble him with a confession of error, or with malice, or with freighted silence, or with anything ordinarily human. He heard her coming on toward the third floor now. Around him, rafters with cobwebs, boxes, trunks, the furniture from Aunt Mae’s sunporch—it had been here for years and years—lamps, mason jars, rope, his father’s violin. He’d forgotten about that, the violin. He’d sit in the kitchen in the gray shingled house they’d lived in then, on the Lewiston Road, and, bow lightly hanging from his plumber’s fist, he would play for hours and hours. He played well. Fred Clumly’s mother would sit under the clock darning, nodding her head. It was dark outside, and inside there was only the comforting yellow of the oil lamp’s light above his mother’s elbow. When she nodded her shadow would extend itself on the wall, then quickly retract. “Good luck,” he whispered to the dead.

When he was safely outside, with the tape recorder tucked inside his shirt, he hurried through the garden and around in back of his neighbors’ houses and came out on Oak Street, a hundred yards from where the Sunlight Man had weeks ago painted the word
love
across two lanes. Then, jaw set, he set off on foot toward Main and, eventually, the police station garage. He could not risk taking his own car from his own garage; Esther would wonder why he hadn’t spoken to her. Let her think he’d worked late, or let her think-be-cause he’d left his uniform and gun—let her think whatever she thought. There would, perhaps, be time for reparations. It did not matter.

The walk took him half an hour. He listened outside the garage door. They were not talking about him. He went in.

He drove slowly through town in the gathering dusk, and when he saw the funeral—
Mrs. Palazzo,
he thought—he did not pull in. The crowd was small. She had not had many friends. Her eyes were those of a cruel, self-pitying old witch, and the heavy wrinkles going down from her nose were black. Her hair was black, though she was old, and she had traces of beard and moustache. Manlike, she was. Like the nurse at the mental hospital, or like Salvador’s mother. Mrs. Palazzo was so ugly, in fact, that she made a man stop and think. She grew more manlike every year, just as he, Fred Clumly, grew more womanish. Her thought hardened like barnacles around her few selfish ideas as Clumly’s mind softened, expanded, grew lax. Was that the usual case with old women and men? A part of the general order? It was not the case with Esther. As she lost one by one all the outer signs of her womanhood she gained—if it could be called a gain—an increasing femininity of mind.
Like the sea,
he thought. He hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant by it. He had an image of a calm and placid sea where nothing stirred, where the water was clear and pointlessly beautiful, but always darker than a man imagined, and down inside its darkness things were stirring, omens and portents. To tell the truth, he did not know her. Never had. Clumly tipped down his black hat more and squinted. “Strange thoughts,” he said.

5

JUDGE:
Clumly! Sir! You look like hell!

CLUMLY:
That may be.

JUDGE:
Well come in. Good Lord! Have a chair. Let me give you a whiskey.

CLUMLY:
No need. I’m not a drinking man.

JUDGE:
No of course. Sorry. What the devil’s happened?

CLUMLY:
You heard about the informal investigation.

JUDGE:
Why, no.

CLUMLY:
I think you may have.

JUDGE:
I give you my solemn word I had nothing to do—

CLUMLY:
No matter. What’s done is done.

JUDGE:
It’s not about that, then? I’ll tell you the truth, Fred-

CLUMLY:
Never mind.

JUDGE:
As you please.

(Silence.)

JUDGE:
You looked over the article on Houdini? The one I brought by?

CLUMLY:
No.

JUDGE:
No?

CLUMLY:
I was not very interested.

JUDGE:
Ah! But I thought, since you’re dealing with this mad magician—

CLUMLY:
And since he was the writer of the article …

JUDGE:
You’ve found out, then.

CLUMLY:
No thanks to you.

JUDGE:
Don’t be harsh, now. I’ve been close to the family for years. As long as there was a chance the boy would do the sensible thing, disappear, you know—

CLUMLY:
Naturally.

JUDGE:
It’s been hell on you, I can see. But it’s a funny thing. It’s done you good. No doubt that seems unfeeling, but it’s a fact. It’s changed you. Made you, I don’t know—

CLUMLY:
Ferocious.

JUDGE:
Yes.
(Thoughtfully.)
Yes. It’s ironic. Just when it’s time to step down, you become—

CLUMLY:
“Step down.” Yes.

JUDGE:
Pardon?

CLUMLY:
A funny world.

(Silence.)

JUDGE:
It’s made a better man of you. I wasn’t sure of myself, at the beginning of all this. But I must admit, it’s turned out, some ways. Though it’s terrible, of course.

CLUMLY:
So you always say. Your schemes have always turned out, since the beginning. However terrible.

JUDGE:
You’re angry. That will pass.

CLUMLY:
Yes, I’ll forget.

JUDGE:
We all forget.

CLUMLY:
That’s Nature. It’s no respecter of persons.

JUDGE:
Ha ha.
(Silence.)
Well, you’ve brought that worse news I predicted. You recall?

CLUMLY:
I recall. It was a guess.

JUDGE:
A judgment of character, more like.

CLUMLY:
A guess about character, maybe. Not a judgment. From an old drunk?

(Silence.)

JUDGE:
It’s made you bitter.

CLUMLY:
Tired.

(Silence.)

JUDGE:
You’re wrong, Fred, those suspicions. I defended you. I refused to act. They wanted me to, all right. They couldn’t move me.

CLUMLY:
More’s the pity.

XX

Winged Figure
Carrying
Sacrificial
Animal

After these first warnings, signs of death will
quickly multiply, until, in obedience to
immutable laws, stark winter with its ice
is here.

—The I Ching

She had underestimated hate.

For three days, off and on, he’d kept them in the wet and dark of the cellar, in dark water where rats swam, bound tightly hand foot and waist. An act of madness, partly—of monstrous sadism. But when she said to him, “Why are you doing this?” he said, “Because I’m busy. Otherwise engaged. Do you imagine I have nothing else in all the universe to take care of except you?” True and irrelevant, though he believed it. It was his only possible alternative to killing them, yes, assuming the course he’d embarked on. When he was out doing whatever it was he was doing—something increasingly urgent and increasingly unbalanced, she knew by his eyes—he could not be troubled with worries over what they were up to at the house. And it was not any longer strange to her that even Nick should be tied in the cellar. Voluntarily, for reasons no longer mysterious to Millie, the Sunlight Man had taken up Nick’s cause; voluntarily he had brought him out of jail to his present freedom; but he never made Nick his equal, and never would: their minds were worlds apart, as differently built as the minds of an elephant and a horse. And so they were here, half-starved, in pain, frightened, heads drooping, miserably bound to their three splintery cellar posts. She believed she caught, sometimes, the Runian sisters’ voices, ghostly echoes from an earlier violent time.

Sometimes Luke would twist his head over his shoulder and roll his eyes at her. “So explain why he simply buried Hardesty without a word,” his furious eyes said.

“Because,” she said in her mind. She heard chickens outside. She was surprised that Luke still had any. They ran in the yard, she remembered. He never fed them.

The Sunlight Man never slept, and his eyes were as baggy as an ape’s; yet what it was he was busy at, no one knew. All day long they could hear him sawing and hammering up in the garage. And at night after he’d brought them their supper he would dress up as if to give a concert or attend a formal ball. Sometimes he would come down the cellar steps and bend over, near the foot of the stairs, hands on his knees, to look at them as though they were animals he was tending. (The Runian sisters watched timidly from the shadows.) Then again sometimes he would take off his socks and shoes and wade toward them, holding up his pantlegs, his bearded and longhaired head thrown forward, eyes squinting like an inventor’s, and would scrutinize their faces, one after another. Once, twice, he had taken them all upstairs for an hour and a half, to give them a rest, he said. When Luke and she were seated on the couch, numb and weak, he’d sent Nick upstairs with a snap of his fingers (and Nick had gone, dutifully, too weak to chance fighting), and when Nick came back he was wearing a gold vest and gold slippers and a turban. They were made of what looked like the cloth from an ironing board. The Sunlight Man clapped with a grotesque parody of delight, twirled away from them and out to the kitchen, then emerged not more than a second later, as it seemed to her, in a black and red cape, with a high silk hat balanced on his ratiocination-colored hair. “You’re hungry?” he asked with an obscene leer. “Eggs, Nicodemus!” Nick bowed from the waist as if to leave, then straightened again, and when he extended his hands to the Sunlight Man he had four eggs between his long fingers. “Hah!” the Sunlight Man said. He took the eggs quickly and nimbly but not nimbly enough: one fell to the rug and broke. He shrugged and looked sheepish. Then he snatched off his hat and held it up like a bowl and with one hand cracked and dumped the remaining eggs down inside it, and tossed the shells to Nick. He snatched a plain lightbulb from his suitcoat pocket—he was babbling all the time—”Observe! Watch closely! We proceed to step C of our experiment!”—held the lightbulb under the hat, where it went on, as if from electricity inside his hand, then triumphantly held out the hat to them. Down inside there was an omelette. “Take, eat!” he said. “Et cetera.” There were hairs in the omelette, but Luke seemed not to notice them. As for herself, she was so sick with hunger she could barely get the stuff down.